Happy Halloween!

 When is a Scary Monster Movie not Scary?

We have reached that time of year when tradition demands the scary and the spooky.

While there is certainly no shortage of horror films to consider for a Halloween film evening, I have decided to go for a slightly different option this year.


Matinee (1993) is director Joe Dante's love letter to his own childhood, and specifically the monster movies of the 1950s and 60s that made such an impression on him during his formative years.


John Goodman plays (fictional) film-maker Laurence Woolsey, a director of extremely schlocky and gimmick-laden "scary" movies, who has arrived in Key West Florida to promote his latest opus; an exploitational B-picture about a half-man-half-ant (called-inevitably-Mant).



As fate would have it, the premiere of his new film coincides with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; a moment in 20th Century history when the world came as close as it ever came to actual, full-scale Nuclear War.


Matinee cheerfully contrasts the very cheesy scares of a bad monster movie with the very real fears of actual Nuclear Armageddon, all seen through the eyes of a group of innocent (but slightly hormonal) teenagers.


In the middle of all this social commentary is the film itself, Mant, a beautifully rendered tribute to the work of two actual film-makers of the era: Roger Corman (with whom Joe Dante actually worked at the beginning of his career) and more specifically, William Castle, whose carnival-inspired publicity techniques made him a one-man legend in the rather niche world of schlocky horror.


In an odd way, this is the most personal film Joe Dante has ever made, and it stands as a loving tribute to an era when (at least in popular perception) Nuclear Armageddon and Giant Bugs were one and the same.


We'll be screening Matinee at the Victoria Park Baptist Church at 7.30pm on Thursday the 28th of October (which is, by a curious coincidence, the exact date of the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Spooky!).

Come along, if you dare!

(No seriously, it's a very sweet film, and not even a teensy tinsy bit scary.)


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Feast of "Stephen"

Image
If you're a Christian, you might know "The Feast of Stephen" as St. Stephen's Day (the 26th of December) when young men dress up in vaguely nightmarish straw costumes and wander around the town playing alarming music while carrying a dead bird. This is not about that. If you're a Doctor Who fan, you might know The Feast of Stephen as the first ever Doctor Who Christmas episode (broadcast on Christmas Day in 1965).  This is not about that either. For our purposes this week, The Feast of Stephen  concerns a small but pivotal character in the beloved Noël Coward/David Lean classic Brief Encounter .  Brief Encounter is remembered today as perhaps the most famous unconsummated love affair in cinema history. Released in 1945 (but without so much as the slightest hint of a war or its effects) it tells the story of two (married) individuals who meet by chance on a train platform and proceed to teeter on the brink of having an affair for a few weeks. They do not, in fac...
Read more

Carry On... #populist demagogues

Image
Last week's film ( It's Always Fair Weather ) was a fun, feel-good MGM Musical that laughed at the rapidly growing power of television (and television advertising in particular) in 1950s American society. Our next film also examines the power of television, but without the "feel-good" part. A Face in the Crowd was released in 1957, but the story it tells is one that feels uncomfortably close to the bone in our present day.  It's no coincidence that the film received a widespread re-evaluation in 2016, just as a certain vulgar media personality was gaining devoted populist support in the political arena. Written by Budd Schulberg and directed by Elia Kazan (the pair who had brought you On the Waterfront three years earlier) A Face in the Crowd follows the career of Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes, an obnoxious, hillbilly media personality with "man-of-the-people" appeal and a devoted, almost cult-like following (played with frightening power by Andy ...
Read more
Image
  Movie Nights at the  Victoria Park Baptist Church And so life goes on. Some of you may remember that our film series in early 2020 was rudely interrupted by a Global Pandemic. The subsequent year and a half has been, well... You know things are pretty bad when you find yourself wondering if there is a plural for "Apocalypse". But at any rate, here we are ( Apocalypses? Apocali? That's going to bother you now, isn't it?) facing the prospect of attempting to pick up the pieces of Civilisation - assuming of course we don't go into another Lockdown first. ( Apocalyae?   Apocalim? ) Movie-going, like so many communal activities, has taken a severe hit during the Pandemic, and I'm willing to hazard a guess that most of the films you have watched over the last eighteen months have been from the comfort of home, with, at most, a family member or two. But watching a film like this: ....isn't really the same as watching a film like this : Sadly we don't quite...
Read more

And So, the 70's...

Image
 Raging Riders, and Lots of Bull Depending on who you ask, the ten-year period of 1965-1975 was either one of the best eras in American cinema, or one of the worst. While it was certainly a Golden Age if you were a straight white male who loved extreme violence, casual sexism, xenophobia and homophobia, it was far less enjoyable if such things tended to make you uncomfortable. (Three guesses how I feel about this era.) To some extent, Cinema was merely reflecting the tone of Society itself during that decade. After living through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of  President Kennedy (and, two years later, Malcolm X; and a few years after that , Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King) there were the almost daily news reports of  violent suppression of  Civil Rights campaigners and (if you wanted some relief from the vicious and bloody domestic news) there was the ongoing horror show of the Vietnam War. Eventually of course the 1960s came to an end, and Ame...
Read more

Another Cold War Movie. A very, very Cold War Movie.

Image
 Last week we saw a film about the Cold War as seen by a director who experienced it as a young teenager. The International situation may have been apocalyptic and grim, but none of that mattered as much as the newest monster movie. This week is going to be another film about the Cold War, but viewed through the very different lens of a director in his mid-fifties who had lived through the eras of World War Two and The Holocaust. Billy Wilder may be (quite rightly) remembered for films like Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Some Like it Hot etc. but One, Two, Three is one of his most cynical, savage and unforgiving comedies. Berlin in 1961 was a divided city. The East and West were controlled by the Russians and Americans respectively, but travel between the two regions was still possible. It was in fact during the making of this film that the infamous wall went up, sealing East Berlin off from the West for almost thirty years. I'm not going to attempt to expl...
Read more